Personal Stories On Topics That Matter

It was neither an all-out war, nor a terrorist attack. Still, the Cuban Missile Crisis brought three countries to the brink of nuclear war. Though it only lasted 13 days, what happened in October 1962 left indelible marks on those who remember it.

I lived through the Cuban Missile Crisis. In fact growing up in Miami in 1962 put me right at ground zero for the nuclear apocalypse everyone was suddenly forced to imagine. I could try to tell you how harrowing those days were, but I think an 11-year-old boy was more mystified than anything that someone could just appear on the television and announce, in so many words, that the world could end in a matter of days or hours. It was scary alright, but it was surreal too. And it wasn’t just that the specter of annihilation sprang up so suddenly; it was that it might even be unleashed accidentally. A misplaced or misunderstood word in the negotiations, enemy ships coming a little too close together in the naval blockade of Cuba, a faulty switch on a rocket launcher. Anything. Of course I could picture what might happen then. I knew all about nuclear blasts and the unearthly hurricane of fire that would engulf everything if someone launched a weapon. I’d been through all the ridiculous drills at school, getting away from the windows, getting under the desks. My friends and I joked about how useless and absurd all of that was in light of the fact that the school building itself and everything within god knows how many square miles of it was going to be vaporized. Hadn’t the grownups been paying attention to the newsreel footage? What were they talking about?

Well, the comet that had come out of nowhere missed the earth; we survived. Is that what it meant? I couldn’t have known it at the time—I was just a boy, and history hadn’t happened yet, so no one could have known it really—but the Cuban Missile Crisis was the first shot fired in the Vietnam war. Or so it seems to me now. I might never have made the connection except that many years later—15 years or so—Vietnam would become a preoccupation for me, a theme around which I managed to muster more undivided attention than just about anything else I’ve ever dug into. In fact, these recollections of Cuba and my boyhood may cause me to dig into it all over again. Not that obsession with Vietnam was all that unusual. That war was a notorious magnet for the mind, as are so many wars, especially for those who fight them, as well as their families. But sometimes even for those like me who don’t. When I reflect on the events in Cuba in ’62 I end up thinking not so much about how close to annihilation we all were, but how hard it is to really know what’s going on several layers down beneath the surface of life, and how the deeper ripples from events will help shape the future. Cracking the code was important for a kid who was always mystified about how his father’s world worked. When I was a boy (I bet it was around the time of the Cuban situation) I read and loved The Arabian Nights stories. I remember one involving Sinbad in which the sailors on a ship reach an island where they decide to take some shore leave. When they eventually get hungry they start a fire to cook a meal. All of a sudden the island starts quaking, and the sailors as well as those still on the ship not far away, realize that what they thought was an island is really the back of a gigantic whale. As the whale dives into the depths all the sailors need to frantically scramble off its back and try to swim back to their ship. I guess that’s what history seems to me sometimes. A great whale we mistake for an island. Everything is going along pretty normally, you think, and then one day you wake up to discover that, surprise, the entire financial system is about to collapse and needs to be bailed out. Or that, surprise, you’re on the brink of nuclear war.

In early 1965 the U.S. began openly bombing a small peasant country few Americans had ever even heard of. We’d eventually learn that we did this to send a message. In those days American leaders were anxious to find a way to contain communism, which they regarded as a kind of zombie plague threatening the entire planet. They needed to do this without in each instance going through another nuclear showdown with either the Soviet Union or China. In ’62 everyone had gotten a taste of how insanely dangerous that was. The intended message behind the bombing campaign was, “Wherever we see the opportunity, we’re going to take action on the ground to make sure you know we’re serious about resisting aggression. If you think we’re going to blink or take the easy road of avoiding conflict, you’re mistaken.” The pain the American jets inflicted on North Vietnam was real enough, but the real target was the minds of the enemy’s leaders. It was part of the newfangled idea of “limited war” which was designed for the sole purpose of maintaining American “credibility.” In one of the most glaring passages of the Pentagon’s official history of the war, a senior official remarks that “70% of our aim in Vietnam is to avoid a humiliating defeat,” and blow to our credibility. (As for the aim of preserving freedom in South Vietnam: a mere 10%. Finally, some candor.) Our credibility was exactly what Kennedy believed he’d reinforced during the Cuban Missile Crisis. And if the Soviet superpower had backed down, what “tiny, backward nation,” as Robert McNamara called North Vietnam, would be insane enough to stand up to the indomitability of American power?

The North Vietnamese apparently didn’t get the message. Were they deaf? Perhaps there was something else at stake for them? For three long years after the bombing began the American approach to the enemy’s surprising and annoying resistance was to merely turn up the volume of the message—in other words to escalate the level of military force. There had to be some point at which they’d “get” the intended message. Right? I can remember the time when people used the phrase “light at the end of the tunnel” without cynicism. Nevertheless, some senior officials were already expressing doubt that the strategy of trying to intimidate the North Vietnamese and their allies in South Vietnam would ever succeed. This was a well-kept secret. Ordinary American citizens knew nothing about what was really happening. While they believed we were winning the war, many of the brains behind the Vietnam operation were secretly trying to come to grips with the even scarier implication that we were now stuck. Apparently the architects of limited war hadn’t thought through the end game. It’s here that the Vietnam adventure really comes off the rails. For if we couldn’t force the North Vietnamese to give up and go home as we had the Russians, we certainly couldn’t allow them to do the same to us. Not without admitting the very weakness and lack of resolve we were there to prove in the first place.

We were stuck. For years. We couldn’t possibly “cut and run,” or risk “humiliation,” or “abandon our allies,” or “lose credibility,” or “embolden our enemies.” How many times have we recycled those clichés since that time?

Would we ever have risked the Vietnam gambit if we hadn’t first stared down the Soviet Union during the Cuban crisis and watched them withdraw their missiles? It’s hard for me to not see the connections among all these events in retrospect.

I’m thinking now of a cold January day in 1961, cold even in Miami. I sat on the floor in front of our old black and white TV set watching President Kennedy deliver his inaugural speech, his breath turning to steam in the freezing air. That address is right up there with the greatest American political speeches. How many people over the years have repeated the line: “And so my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country”? I sat there as transfixed as anyone when he first spoke those words. I was only ten, but it may mark the moment when I first became interested in politics. As everyone knows, and some of us actually remember, Kennedy was a tremendously charismatic public figure, and even his Bostonian accents and cadences seemed to elevate and ennoble his rhetoric. But there were other unforgettable and even portentous things he said that day. “Let every nation know, whether it wishes us well or ill, that we shall pay any price, bear any burden, meet any hardship, support any friend, oppose any foe, in order to ensure the survival and the success of liberty. This we pledge—and more.” “Yes of course,” the heart said proudly: “pay any price, bear any burden…support any friend.” In 1961 we had no idea yet what that meant, and especially no idea of what it would really mean from ‘65 to ‘72.

It’s easy to picture the 60’s and the early 70’s as a rebellious and disorderly and irrational and often violent time—and in truth that’s how many of us experienced them. Some of it probably had no rhyme or reason, and occasionally I went right along with my peers and friends in a conscious effort to throw rhyme and reason out the window. We convinced ourselves that freedom and chaos were easy partners, at least for a while. But as it turns out some parts of that time did make sense, even if the narrative was fatal. The problem was that you could only see this in retrospect. The question is whether that must always be true. I don’t know how to answer that question, especially briefly and simply, except to express ambivalence.

JFK was not a popular president in Corona del Mar, my sleepy Orange County, California beach town. There were only two registered Democrats in our half-built housing development on the edge of town which rose like layers of a wedding cake above three private, rocky beaches. Every home had an ocean view, with Catalina straight ahead on the horizon.

My mother, especially, did not care for President Kennedy. It was personal: Pat Nixon had taught typing at her high school. I’d worn a “Dick Nixon for President” button in second grade during the 1960 presidential campaign.

So I was alarmed when Mom clicked on the car radio after our weekly Brownie meeting ended in the church social hall just before 4:00 the afternoon of Monday, October 22, 1962, and put her hand on my arm.

“Who’s talking?” I asked.

“President Kennedy.”

Mom leaned forward over the big steering wheel of her Lincoln Continental as she drove slowly up and down the hills that paralleled Pacific Coast Highway, listening to the radio. I listened too. My heart quickened as President Kennedy scared me with phrases such as: “… an explicit threat to the peace and security of all the Americas. … worldwide nuclear war. … To halt this offensive buildup, a strict quarantine on all offensive military equipment under shipment to Cuba is being initiated. ... to regard any nuclear missile launched from Cuba against any nation in the Western Hemisphere as an attack by the Soviet Union on the United States, requiring a full retaliatory response upon the Soviet Union. … provocative threat to world peace.” And, “… abyss of destruction.”

We sat in our driveway as Kennedy concluded with, “Thank you and good night.”

I felt glued to the front seat, too shaken to get out of the car and open the garage door.

My two older brothers were home with my younger brother. They’d watched Kennedy on TV, and appeared excited about the prospect of war with the Soviet Union. (Boys!) War—nuclear war—was suddenly a real and imminent possibility. My oldest brother, David, explained that a quarantine was like a blockade. The U.S. was setting one up around Cuba, 90 miles off the Florida coast, to intercept any Soviet ships that might be taking missile-building equipment to the U.S.S.R.’s Communist ally, Cuba. Scary stuff. Kennedy also ordered the Soviets to dismantle the nuclear missile sites the U.S. knew were there. If they didn’t, there would be consequences.

Gulp.

Then I remembered that Dad had left in the morning on a business trip—to Cape Canaveral, Florida! (His aerospace company was scheduled to launch a missile into space.) He called Monday night and told me not to worry. I asked why we hadn’t built a fallout shelter under our house. I knew there was one in the home under construction below ours, one street up from the beach. He said he didn’t think we needed one. “But now we do,” I insisted.

When my fourth-grade teacher opened the door to our classroom Tuesday morning, I saw that all the desks had been turned forty-five degrees, away from the wall of windows. Mr. Magnuson explained that light from a nuclear explosion is blindingly bright. Also, we’d fare better with our backs to the windows if glass exploded in. We weren’t at our desks five minutes before we heard the bell for the first of many duck-and-cover drills of the day. I dropped to the cold linoleum and covered my eyes with one arm, and the back of my neck with the other.

I don’t think we did any regular schoolwork the rest of the week. Mr. Magnuson read to us. He also told war stories, of all things. He told us he’d been a fighter pilot in World War II, dropping bombs on Nazi Germany. “I never thought I’d live to see the age of 25.” But he had.

We weren’t a TV-news family, but I read the Los Angeles Times daily, including articles headlined by “SHOWDOWN NEAR” and “FATEFUL HOUR NEAR.” Someone reported Soviet subs were spotted off the coast of Catalina—my Catalina. One article said Soviet missiles could reach as far as Los Angeles. And we were a mere 35 miles south of L.A. Dad called home from Florida most nights. By the end of the week, he was certain the U.S. was about to invade Cuba. “Marines are all over this town.”

When Kennedy was running for president, Mom contended he’d take orders from the Pope. Now, she said we needed to support JFK. But how would he avoid a confrontation with Nikita Khrushchev and the Soviet Union? I’d no idea. I was afraid every day would be my last, or at least the last day of life as I’d known it.

On Saturday night, my dramatic teenage brother David pointed to the electric clock above the oven. “If we’re still alive in an hour, we’ll probably make it.”

To my amazement, we did. Mom took us kids to church Sunday morning, and in the middle of the service, while I was praying like crazy down in a pew, Mr. Gomke, the minister, announced that Khrushchev had agreed to Kennedy’s demands. The Cuban Crisis (as it was called then) had ended. Like my teacher the fighter pilot, I had eluded catastrophe.

The intense fear I experienced that Monday to Sunday when I was nine years old is as fresh today as it was more than half a century ago—it had that much of an impact on me. I studied the Cuban Missile Crisis in high school and college, and learned that the danger was real: the U.S. came as close to nuclear war with the Soviet Union as it ever would.

I’m also completing a novel for young people about a family in turmoil during that scary week. Though fiction, my main character has an older brother who proclaims impending doom and destruction that Saturday night in October 1962. And there’s a half-built neighborhood fallout shelter. Sometimes history is more compelling than fiction.

For most of us, the Cuban Missile Crisis began on October 16, 1962, 7 p.m. Eastern Time, when President Kennedy announced on all three national television networks that the Soviet Union was installing nuclear-armed missiles in Cuba. The sites were in and the weapons were arriving. For the next thirteen days, Americans old enough to be aware of what was happening were terrified. We were on the brink of a nuclear war. America threw up a naval blockade to stop the missiles from reaching Cuba. Khrushchev vowed not to back down. Kennedy threatened massive retaliation.

In October, 1962, my wife Frenchie and I were juniors at Doane College in Crete Nebraska. We did not perceive Nebraska to be in direct danger of a nuclear attack. But we thought the east coast of the U.S. might well sustain millions of casualties in an exchange with the Soviet Union. We heard from friends that there were all sorts of evacuation plans for people in places like New York City and Washington D.C. But everyone knew deep down they would not work; most of those who tried to escape would simply die caught in traffic jams rather than in their homes. Between classes and at mealtime everyone huddled around the few televisions available on campus, to see what Walter Cronkite and Chet Huntley and David Brinkley and the rest of them could tell us. The story of Gregory Peck and Ava Gardner and the rest of the world in the 1959 film “On the Beach” seemed like it might come true.

The crisis finally ended when Kennedy and United Nations Secretary-General U Thant reached an agreement with Khrushchev. At least the first crisis ended. For me, a second crisis was just getting started, a crisis of confidence in U.S. foreign policy. It is still going on.

My world view at the beginning of the Missile Crisis was pretty straightforward and shared by everyone I knew. After World War II, the Soviets had enslaved Eastern Europe. They wanted the rest. Only America's nuclear weapons kept them from marching on Western Europe. Eventually, they would probably attack. With their Communistic zeal and disregard for human life, they would be willing to sacrifice millions of Russians to eliminate our threat to their quest for world domination. It was just a matter of time.

My generation grew up with the expectation of nuclear war. We practiced "ducking and covering" --- crouching under our desks at school, which apparently someone thought might help in the event of a nuclear attack. In the early nineteen fifties, my grandfather and I were members of the Ground Observer Corps. Every Saturday morning we climbed the stairs to the clock tower at Union College in Lincoln, Nebraska, where we watched for Soviet bombers, and reported every plane we spotted, from Piper Cubs to Lincoln Air Force Base b-47s by direct phone line to SAC headquarters in Omaha.

By October 1962 things seemed to have gotten worse, a lot of it having to do with Cuba. Fidel Castro had won the revolution in Cuba during Eisenhower's last term. Castro had been quite a sympathetic figure to most Americans. He was a freedom fighter against the very corrupt Batista regime. He was a baseball fan, and he was friendly with Americans and American journalists. But after the revolution he turned out to be a Communist and Eisenhower broke off relations with Cuba. Their economy was deprived of its two main pillars: American purchases of sugar and cigars. And Cuba became a client state of the U.S.S.R. In the 1960 election, Kennedy told us (wrongly) that the Soviet Union was outpacing us in the manufacture and installation of nuclear armed missiles. In 1961 the U.S. installed Jupiter missiles in Turkey aimed at Moscow. These were in addition to those already in England. In April, the U.S. sponsored an invasion of Cuba --- the "Bay of Pigs" --- which failed miserably. In August, Khrushchev built the Berlin Wall. Things were heating up.

I was a philosophy major, but for the thirteen days of the crisis the only philosopher I read was Bertrand Russell. A Nobel Prize winner, Russell's telegrams to Kennedy, Khrushchev and U Thant received a fair amount of publicity, and they seemed to be taken seriously by the last two. Russell was very critical of Kennedy. He pointed out that America had intermediate range nuclear missiles aimed at Moscow in England and Turkey. Kennedy was overreacting, Russell said, to getting a taste of what it was like to have such weapons aimed at one. There is evidence that Khruschev was moved by Russell in standing up to the Russian military. In the end Kennedy ignored most of his advisors too, but this was probably due more to good advice from Adlai Stevenson than from Bertrand Russell.

A bit about Russell. He was then 90. He had been fired from Cambridge University and jailed for his opposition to World War I. He was an early and effective critic of both Hitler and Stalin. In the early 40's, Russell was offered positions at CUNY and UCLA. But they were withdrawn because of his “immorality.” (The most serious charge: he didn’t think homsexuality should be illegal). In the 50’s he became a leading advocate of nuclear disarmament and he was jailed once again for leading protests.

Russells' position went against everything I believed. But I began thinking and reading about Cuba. The situation didn't seem at all comparable to Eastern Europe. The Russians didn't march into Cuba. It was a homegrown revolution. There was every reason to think that most Cubans would be better off under Castro than Batista, even if he was a Communist. In retrospect, Eisenhower's reaction, more or less trying to freeze Castro's Cuba out of the civilized world, seemed uncalled for.

The attempted invasion of Cuba began to seem not only inept, but just wrong. What right did we have to decide who was going to be in charge in Cuba?

And, as Russell pointed out, the installation of Jupiter missiles in Turkey, suitable only for a first strike and aimed at the Western Part of the Soviet Union, was an escalation in the Cold War. It was, as Senator Albert Gore (Al Gore's father) said at the time, a "provocation."

In the end, both Khrushchev and Kennedy resisted their advisors. Khrushchev slowed the ships down; Kennedy stayed his military's hand when the Cubans, with Soviet help, shot down a U2 plane we flew over Cuba. Khrushchev agreed to move the weapons out of Cuba; Kennedy promised not to invade the island. And Kennedy also promised, not publicly, to get the missiles out of Turkey. Kennedy deserved credit for listening to Stevenson and seeking a peacful way out. But he and Eisenhower, as well as Khrushchev, deserved a lot of blame for getting us into the mess in the first place.

In my case, and many others too, I'm sure, a process began during the Crisis that was to be exacerbated a few years later by the Viet-Nam War, and has never stopped: the habit of being suspicious about the reasons the U.S. claims it has for military intervention overseas, whether offered by Democrats or Republicans, Conservatives or Liberals, the Pentagon or the State Department. The Cuban Missile Crisis pulled back the curtain, and the Wizards of Washington were ugly. Don’t get me wrong. Except for Norway and a couple of other places, I also don’t much care for any other nations’ foreign policies either. The world is a crazy place, but we are a big part of the craziness.

I remember the crisis very well. A recent graduate of Rice University, I was living in Houston, just a short 90 miles from Cuba. Very aware of our own proximity to Havana, my friends and I worried about our own vulnerability as well as the dangers to our country. Also, I had my own personal concerns. My college beau, who had been Navy ROTC, was cruising at that moment toward Cuba as a part of the flotilla of US ships sent to blockade the Russian ships delivering nuclear weapons. All of us were scared.

I was in the Rice football stadium watching the game with my father on the night the Russian ships were to reach the blockade. At the beginning of the game, as the national anthem played, every single person stood up, put their hand over their hearts and sang the anthem as LOUDLY as they could! It was an amazing experience. We were united in fear and determination and loyalty to our country. Those thirteen days were the time in my life when I felt the most threat to the United States from another country.

The fear during the Cuban Missile Crisis was unlike 9/11, which my husband and I actually witnessed from Newark Airport. As a result of the attack, we were hastily evacuated from the airport. Parked on the empty highway outside the airport, we watched the towers fall. It was horrific. But comparing these two traumatic events, I was much more frightened during the Cuban Missile Crisis. During those days of waiting, the tension mounted while the world watched to see what Russia would do and how the U.S. would respond. Things moved much more slowly in 1960. 9/11 came out of the blue, not preceded by warning signs. Unfortunately as a result of 9/11, terrorism is once again building fear in our nation. But thankfully it is not to the level felt in October 1960.